Chapter Text
here is what ilia malinin knew about vera petrova coming into the 2022-23 season, as of early july 2022:
she was the youngest women's champion at worlds since tara lipinski. she had the highest pcs scores in the ladies field he'd ever seen from a north american skater, which said something, because north american ladies skating was not known for its pcs and the japanese girls dominated that particular conversation. she had a technical base value that kept up with the russian girls, which was incredible because north american ladies skating was not known for its technical base value. she had a triple axel that made seasoned commentators lose their composure on live television. she'd filed a complaint against her coach in 2021 that had resulted in said coach being banned from traveling to the olympics with her, and the general consensus among the skating community was that vasilisa vinogradova had gotten off lightly and that it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped. she had won bronze at the olympics at fifteen, just four months ago, while visibly shaking on the podium.
she had these eyes. he'd noticed that at the olympics, in the way you noticed things from a distance through a television screen — he'd watched the ladies event from his living room, buzzing with his own nerves about making his senior worlds debut the following month, and he'd looked up when the american girl got her scores and seen the way she looked at the camera and thought oh. not in the way that people sometimes assumed he meant when he told this story later. not like that yet. just: oh. that is a person who has seen something. the kind of eyes that you had when you'd looked at something very dark and then had to keep going anyway.
he knew all of that.
what he had apparently not known — not registered, despite his mother telling him apparently multiple times over several weeks — was that vera petrova had moved her training base to skatequest. was, in fact, here. had been here. was going to keep being here.
it started because of a water bottle.
specifically, his water bottle. specifically, his lucky water bottle — the white one with the little cat stickers on the side that his dad had gotten him as a joke two birthdays ago and that he'd since become pathologically attached to in the way only athletes could be pathologically attached to inanimate objects. he'd left it at the boards during their session that morning, realized it somewhere around the third traffic light on the way home, and had made the tactical error of mentioning it out loud in the car.
"i can turn around," his mother had said, in the tone she used when she was already checking the mirrors.
"you don't have to—"
she had turned around.
so that was how ilia malinin ended up standing in the doorway of the main rink at skatequest at nine forty-seven on a saturday morning in july, seventeen years old, still in his training clothes, watching something that took him a genuinely embarrassing number of seconds to figure out.
the rink was not empty.
this was, in and of itself, unremarkable. the rink was frequently not empty. there were other skaters who trained here, other coaches, other sessions that ran parallel to or adjacent to his own. he knew this. he had, in fact, passed several of them in the hallways and the lobby and the parking lot on any number of occasions and exchanged the particular nod of mutual acknowledgment that two athletes shared when they were both too tired to form words.
what was happening at the far end of the ice was not, however, a normal practice.
a girl — small, dark-haired, with the posture of someone who had been doing ballet since before she could walk and had never once been allowed to forget it — was standing at center ice. she was not skating. she appeared to be in the middle of an argument with a man at the boards that ilia vaguely recognized as nikolai karamazov, coach of—
oh.
oh.
"—told you," the girl was saying, and her voice carried the way voices did in empty rinks, bouncing off the boards and the rafters and the cold air until it was impossible to pretend you hadn't heard. "i told you this morning. the entry is wrong. the entry has been wrong for three years and nobody listened to me then and i'm not doing it again—"
"veronika—"
"don't veronika me, i've been telling you since i was twelve that the edge was wrong—"
"the edge was fine, you won an olympic medal with that edge—"
"i won an olympic medal despite that edge—"
"oh, of all the—"
ilia decided, with the practiced self-preservation instinct of a seventeen-year-old boy who was not going to die in a skating rink in reston virginia because he'd wanted his favorite water bottle back, that he was going to walk over to the boards, pick up his water bottle, and leave. quickly. he was going to do this quietly and without drawing attention to himself.
this was a good plan. this was, objectively, a very reasonable plan. the boards were on the near side of the rink. the girl and her coach were at the far end. he could be in and out in thirty seconds.
he started walking.
from the ice, the argument continued, unabated and unaware of him. nikolai karamazov had both hands on the boards now, which ilia recognized distantly as a coach-specific gesture meaning i am being very patient right now and i need you to appreciate that. the girl — vera petrova, his brain supplied, unhelpfully, that is vera petrova — had her arms crossed over her chest and was looking at him with an expression that could have frozen a charging animal in its tracks.
"you are being dramatic," nikolai said.
"i'm being correct," vera said. "there's a difference. you should learn it."
"i have been coaching for twenty-one years—"
"and that edge has been wrong for seven of them, so—"
"veronika."
"nikolai."
there was a beat of silence. ilia's hand closed around the neck of his water bottle. he had it. he had the water bottle. he could go. he should go. he was going—
"fine," vera said, and the word landed like a stone dropped in still water. "fine. fine. i'll do it your way."
"thank you—"
"and when it's wrong i'm going to say i told you so. in front of god and everyone."
"that is very mature of you."
"i am incredibly mature."
"you are sixteen—"
"i am mature."
ilia made it to the door before he remembered he needed to breathe.
"did you know," he said, approximately forty-five seconds later, climbing back into the passenger seat of his mother's car and pulling the door shut behind him, "that vera petrova trains here now?"
tatiana malinina did not look up from her phone. "yes."
ilia stared at her. "you knew."
"i told you. many many times." she scrolled through something. "in june. and then again three weeks ago. and then at dinner last tuesday. and then two days ago."
"i—" ilia opened his mouth. closed it. tried again. "i didn't—"
"you were thinking about your quad axel."
he had, in fact, been thinking about his quad axel. he had been thinking about his quad axel consistently since approximately march and he was not going to apologize for it. "you could have told me again."
his mother finally looked up, with the particular expression she'd been deploying against him since infancy — the one that communicated, without words, that she had given birth to him, raised him, driven him to and from a skating rink six days a week for eleven years, and she was choosing, in this moment, to be patient. "would it have changed anything?"
ilia thought about the girl at center ice. the way she'd stood her ground with her arms crossed and her spine ramrod straight and told her coach — nikolai karamazov, who was not a small man and not a gentle presence and who had, by all accounts, helped turn vera petrova from a talented kid into something genuinely extraordinary — without any apparent fear whatsoever, that he was wrong and she was right and she would be saying so in front of god and everyone.
"...no," he admitted.
"then." his mother returned to her phone. "now you know."
"she's—" he searched for the word. "a lot."
"she is a very serious skater," his mother said, in the tone she used when she was being diplomatic, "who has had a very serious couple of years, and nikolai karamazov is the second coach she's had and the first one she's chosen for herself. it is normal." a pause. "she's also sixteen. these things take time."
"they were yelling at each other."
"yes."
"like — yelling yelling. in the middle of the rink."
"ilyusha." his mother set her phone down and looked at him with something that might have been, if he was reading it right, very quiet amusement. "that girl has spent the last several years of her life not yelling at the people she should have been yelling at. let her yell at nikolai. he can take it." she picked her phone back up. "and he knows she trusts him. that's what that is."
ilia looked out the window at the front face of the building. thought about that, the way you turned a strange thing over in your hands to understand its shape.
"does she need other coaches?" he asked. "like — is that happening? because papa was saying at worlds that they were looking to expand her team, but i didn't know if that was—"
"nikolai is her current head coach," his mother said, starting the car. "they're still looking for the right fit. why?"
"just wondering."
"you could ask your father when we get home. he's known nikolai longer than i have."
"yeah." ilia buckled his seatbelt. outside, the skatequest sign sat in the midday light, same as it always had. nothing about it had changed. "maybe i will."
it took him four days to actually talk to her.
four days during which he was, he would like the record to state, perfectly normal about it. he went to his practices. he did his axel entrances. he said hello to the other skaters he passed in the hallway and nodded at the ones he didn't know well enough to say hello to. he did not, notably, go out of his way to avoid or to seek out the small dark-haired girl who was invariably somewhere in the building at any given hour, who seemed to run on some internal engine that had never once been told the concept of rest, who he had heard — on separate occasions, through separate walls — arguing with nikolai about edges, arguing with nikolai about music, and, once, very calmly informing nikolai that he was wrong about a specific point of skating history in a tone so serene and so certain that ilia had genuinely stopped walking in the hallway to listen.
nikolai had, after a pause, admitted she was right.
vera had said "i know" and nothing else.
ilia had stood in the hallway for another three seconds and then continued on his way.
the thing was — and this was the thing that he kept coming back to, in the particular way his brain latched onto things it found interesting and refused to let go — the thing was that she was funny. not ha-ha funny, not the kind of funny that knew it was being funny, but the kind of funny that came from being so completely, uncomplicatedly herself that the rest of the world just sort of happened around her. she had, on monday, informed the rink's front desk that the zamboni was making a sound it shouldn't be making and that someone should look at it before it became someone's problem, and then when the guy at the desk had looked at her like she was being ridiculous she'd just raised both eyebrows and waited, and three hours later there had been a maintenance call about the zamboni.
she'd walked past the desk on her way out without saying anything. she hadn't needed to.
ilia liked that.
he wasn't sure what to do with liking that, exactly. she didn't talk to people — not unfriendly, not obviously hostile, just contained, the way some athletes were contained, all of it saved for the ice — and the few times he'd seen her in passing she'd had headphones in or her eyes somewhere in the middle distance, and he wasn't the kind of person who inserted himself where he wasn't wanted. he'd been raised right.
but.
the thing was.
he'd grown up bilingual — english at school and in the ordinary texture of his life, russian at home and at the rink, his parents' voices in russian when they were tired or frustrated or laughing at something genuinely funny — and he'd spent enough time in international skating to recognize the way russian sat in someone's mouth even when they were speaking english. the slight weight of it. the specific music of it, under the other words.
vera petrova had that.
it was faint — genuinely, impressively faint, she'd clearly been working to sand it down for years — but it was there. he heard it when she talked to nikolai, heard the shift in register, heard english that had been learned on top of something else and worn smooth with use.
he thought about that for four days.
on the fourth day, he decided, in the particular way he occasionally decided things — quickly, without extensive deliberation, in a move that his mother called ilia being ilia and his father called that malinin instinct — that he was going to talk to her.
she was at the boards, bent over one of her skates, doing something to the lace with the focused intensity of someone defusing a bomb. nikolai was on the ice looking tired, like usual. the rink was quiet in the particular way it was quiet in the late afternoon, the overhead lights doing their steady work, the cold settling into the air.
ilia walked over. stopped. waited.
vera did not look up.
"nice triple axel this morning," he said, in russian.
the hands stilled on the skate lace.
it was nice — he had seen her triple axel on television, watched the replay clips online, seen the way commentators stumbled over themselves trying to describe something that was technically a jump and functionally so much more. he had seen it this morning from across the rink during his own session, had tracked the arc of it without entirely meaning to, the height and the hang time and the landing so clean it almost looked effortless, and had thought, privately, yeah, okay. yeah, i get it now.
vera petrova looked up.
she had, up close, the face he'd seen on a television screen in beijing and at junior competitions for a year or two before she'd immediately begun competing on the senior circuit and once (briefly, very briefly) at worlds this year — high cheekbones, eyes that were hazel and sharp and, at this particular moment, doing a very thorough job of evaluating him. she looked at him the way, he thought, you looked at a door when you weren't sure whether to open it.
"malinin," she said. in russian. with the particular flatness of someone who was not going to pretend they didn't know who he was.
"yeah." he held out his hand. "ilia."
she looked at the hand. back at him. then, with the energy of someone making a decision they weren't entirely sure about, she reached up and shook it. her grip was firm in the way skaters' grips were firm, the kind of strength that hid in small hands. "vera."
"i know."
"i know you know." but there was something at the corner of her mouth — not a smile, not quite, just the suggestion of one, the shape a smile might take if it had decided to stay home. "what do you want?"
"nothing," he said. "i just — the axel was nice. i've been trying to clean mine up and i keep fighting the rotation." he shrugged, easy as he could make it. "yours doesn't fight."
vera looked at him for another moment. he had the distinct sense of being assessed. he waited.
"it used to," she said finally, and it came out like something she'd decided to give him, specifically, and hadn't been planning to. "it used to fight back like you wouldn't believe. i used to fall on it three times in a session minimum." she glanced at the ice, briefly, and back. "the rotation's not the problem. it's never the rotation. it's the knee. if your knee's wrong coming in, everything else is wrong." she paused. "are you bending your knee?"
"i—" he thought about it. "i think so."
"you either are or you aren't." she tilted her head very slightly. "you're bending it late. i can see it from here. you're loading too early and then trying to compensate on the rotation and it's making the landing ugly."
he blinked. "how do you—"
"i've been watching you practice for four days," she said, the way you said something very obvious that you didn't understand why you had to explain. "you've got good instincts. you've got bad habits. the late bend is the one that's going to give you trouble." she looked at him very steadily. "fix the entry and the rotation fixes itself."
ilia processed this. "that's it?"
"that's it."
"i've been — my dad has been having me work on the rotation for three weeks—"
"your dad is wrong," vera said, pleasantly. "entry, not rotation. entry, not rotation." she turned back to her skate lace, apparently done. then, without looking up: "you can tell me if i'm right in a week or so."
ilia stood there for a second. "yeah," he said. "okay. yeah, i will."
she didn't say anything else. but the corner of her mouth did something, briefly, that was almost — almost — a smile.
he skated back across the ice to where his skate bag was sitting, and he did not, for the record, smile stupidly at his laces while he unlaced them. that would have been embarrassing.
(he absolutely did.)
across the rink, nikolai came off the ice and stopped next to vera, looking in ilia's direction with an expression that was, for a man who was not known for being easy to read, fairly transparent.
"making friends?" he asked, in russian.
vera pulled her skate lace tight. "no."
"you talked to him for three minutes."
"i gave him a correction." she didn't look up. "it's called being collegial. you should try it."
nikolai was quiet for a moment. vera could feel him very resolutely not smiling, which was somehow worse than if he'd actually smiled.
"his mother's a good skater," he said, eventually. "tatiana. i've known her for years. lovely woman."
"i know who she is."
"roman's wonderful too." nikolai crouched down to pick up the water bottle she'd nearly kicked over. "good people."
"nikolai."
"i'm just saying—"
"nikolai." vera finally looked up. she looked at him with the particular expression she'd developed over five years of being coached by him — the one that said i know what you're doing and i need you to stop. "i told him his entry was wrong. that's all."
nikolai raised both hands in a gesture of pure, entirely unconvincing innocence. "i didn't say anything."
"you were thinking very loudly."
"i'm always thinking loudly. it's a character trait." he straightened. "the session's done. go get in the car, i'll be there shortly."
vera looked back at the ice, at the particular spot where she'd stood for that conversation, at the way the light hit the surface. then she stood, slung her skate bag over her shoulder, and started toward the exit.
"nikolai," she said, without turning around.
"hm."
"the entry correction was correct."
"i know," nikolai said. and she could hear, in the two words, that he was smiling. "i know it was, verochka."
she tilted her head at him, satisfied.
across the rink, ilia was telling his mother something with his hands, the way he seemed to do most things, with his whole body, like the words weren't enough on their own.
tatiana was listening with the expression of a woman who had suspected, for some time, that this was coming.